The request to provide legal justification is warranted, but is unlikely to be heeded by the administration. The technically covert nature of the drone program – even though everyone knows about it – has so far allowed them to dismiss court challenges for the legality of these strikes.

A recent New York Times article quoted administration officials describing how low the standards are for choosing targets. “Some State Department officials,” the Times reported, “have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C.I.A. for identifying a terrorist ‘signature’ were too lax.”

The report added: “The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees ‘three guys doing jumping jacks,’ the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers — but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.”

The House members, led by Reps. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), Ron Paul (R-TX) and Walter Jones (R-NC), warned in a non-binding letter to President Obama on Tuesday that the “signature strikes” can generate “powerful and enduring anti-American sentiment.”

“We are concerned that the use of such ‘signature’ strikes could raise the risk of killing innocent civilians or individuals who may have no relationship to attacks on the United States,” they wrote. “The implications of the use of drones for our national security are profound. They are faceless ambassadors that cause civilian deaths, and are frequently the only direct contact with Americans that the targeted communities have.”

In order to avoid dealing with the inevitable increase in civilian casualties inherent in employing signature strikes, the administration “embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties” that “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”

Robert Grenier, who headed the CIA’s counter-terrorism center from 2004 to 2006 and was previously a CIA station chief in Pakistan, said recently the drone program is too sweeping and may be creating terrorist safe havens.

“We have gone a long way down the road of creating a situation where we are creating more enemies than we are removing from the battlefield. We are already there with regards to Pakistan and Afghanistan,” he said.

“If you strike them indiscriminately you are running the risk of creating a terrific amount of popular anger. They have tribes and clans and large families. Now all of a sudden you have a big problem … I am very concerned about the creation of a larger terrorist safe haven in Yemen,” Grenier said.

As Charles Schmitz, a Yemen expert at Towson University in Maryland, told the LosAngelesTimes, “The more the U.S. applies its current policy, the stronger Al Qaeda seems to get.”

There’s something terribly wrong with these people’s power of reasoning, or lack thereof. How can anyone justify a murder, especially when they claim that the identity of the one murdered was unknown? A murder is not a mercy killing to need justification.

Hey, it’s a cinch to justify; I will do it for him, thus: I felt justified to blow them dudes to pieces on the basis of accurately double-checked intelligence that them ragheads were Al-Qaeda number 2 (again) and his close buddies plotting to take violent action against the interests and the security of these United States.
The House: The House accepts and fully agrees with the bold and heroic decision. Thank you Mr President.

Self-righteous Democrats, erstwhile advocates for peace and the rule of law and now gleeful supporters of endless wars, indefinite detention and summary execution, might note that the signers of this letter are two Republicans and a Democrat defeated in his party's primary. It not only matters whose ox is being gored, but on whose ox is doing the goring.

“Eye for an eye — 360 degree fire — No man, woman or child left standing

Purpose of a drone strike is to protect property by killing people, for the voting majority in our Empire is the 51% most wealthy and they have plundered a forth of all the wealth on earth.

For the greater our voting majority plunders the world, the greater the vengeance, greater the terrorism and the greater must be the collateral murders committed by drones. For killing terrorists only makes more heroes, whereas, killing civilians is what our War on Terrorism is all about, a modern day Crusade actually with “Eye for an eye” the battle cry.